PowerPoint (*.pptx): Some source text will not appear in SDL - but will clean out in the target untranslated. Why??

Hello,

We have a client PPTX file that is 20 slides long. Its formatted with master slides, constant use of styles for headers & bullets. All in all 100% normal, no animations, powerpoint. On slide 10 there is one line of text that will not import into SDL.

I have tried to clear formatting, change the font, change the color, copy it into word and back into power point, copy it into notepad and then back into power point, make a new text box, make a new slide, create a full new PowerPoint file... none of these work.

In every which way I can pull it part and look at it within PowerPoint it looks 100% the same as every other line of text at that level with the same formating.

In the end what I was able to find that SDL is putting each letter into a Weingdings tag.

By going to Review > All Content; and looking for the line after this line I find a wall of tags, in place of my missing text, that read:

<cf size="12"> <Symbol font="Weingdings" value="W"/><Symbol font="Weingdings" value="h"/><Symbol font="Weingdings" value="e"/><Symbol font="Weingdings" value="r"/><Symbol font="Weingdings" value="e"/><Symbol font="Weingdings" value=" "/><Symbol font="Weingdings" value="a"/><Symbol font="Weingdings" value="a"/>...

There's about a million of these tags, but if you look at just the letters it is spelling out "Where an..." which is the beginning of my missing line. Right where it should be...only not open for translation.

 

My major issue with this is that in looking at in PowerPoint, NOTHING tells me there is something wrong with this line of text. And I need to be able to know how to find & prevent this from happening in future files. This missing line caused a delay as we had to go back and get the translation. I can't hand out the original file, but I can give you a 2 slide file doing this issue exactly (b/c coping into a new file doesn't fix it! So I just re keyed the client's text so you can all see the issue and maybe someone smarter than me can fix it).

 

4861.problem files.zip

Parents Reply
  • The only way we were able to resolve this issue was to first run Pseudo translate on the PPT file, turn everything into $$ and then clean it out. Next review the file for any text that it didn't turn into $$ and create a BLT (bi-lingual table) in MS Word and prep that for translation alongside a clean PPT file.

    There are no settings or controls that I have been able to find in SDL that allows me to pick up all the text in a PPT file. And its kind of random on what it will not pick up. Sometimes it's from embedded XLS graphs, sometimes it's on master pages. It's very inconsistent, so I think it must have a lot to do with how the PPT was made? LIke for the most part master pages are not an issue, but from one of our clients it will not pick up their master page text no matter what.

    The Pseudo translate gives us a chance to at least find what will not go into SDL so we don't have any surprise missing text at the end.
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